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At the risk of being inappropriately snarky, to someone who is somewhat skeptical of WoT-based proposals, this reads like: Step 1: the UI will be a mixture of

by rictic 12y ago

At the risk of being inappropriately snarky, to someone who is somewhat skeptical of WoT-based proposals, this reads like: Step 1: the UI will be a mixture of meaningless and annoying to users, causing them to ignore and misuse it Step 2: mumble mumble... self-healing corruption Step 3: the only reason this hasn't succeeded is that people didn't care enough It's exactly those parts in step 2 where I've historically fallen off of the WoT story. What does the UI do when my nontechnical friend has marked my key but his dad has marked it as untrusted? What happens when I lose my phone with my keys on it? How do we not end up in a situation where users see big scary warnings all the time constantly and they just learn to ignore them?

stormbrew 12y ago
I think part of the problem that the OP is sort of addressing is that we've spent so much time trying to gloss over the first-line failures of PGP, in terms of even getting a key to begin with let alone giving it to other people, that we don't even know if there are practical solutions to the problems you're listing. Every tool in this space suffers from the choices PGP implementations have made and asking what your uncle would do if trust conflicts occured when he's going to first be asked if he wants an RSA/RSA, RSA/DSA, DSA sign-only, or RSA sign-only key before he gets there, and then have to figure out what keyserver to send to and then.... Answering these high level UX questions requires having actual users.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Frankly, red/yellow/green is an excellent solution. Do I care now? No. Do I care when the secrecy is important? Maybe I'll not send things to non-green users.
tinco 12y ago
It's not a pitch for implementing WoT. It's a thought experiment to show that it could be viable. It won't make anyone happier if that's what you want, security never made any UI more pleasant. The system might send you an e-mail if someone casts doubt over the trustworthiness of a key. If you lose your phone with your keys, they're gone, just like when you lose your keys. I never said big scary warnings. Just small reminders that what's happening isn't secure, like the green bar in your browser. Most of the time harmless, but informative when you need it.

by rictic 12y ago

stormbrew 12y ago

I think part of the problem that the OP is sort of addressing is that we've spent so much time trying to gloss over the first-line failures of PGP, in terms of even getting a key to begin with let alone giving it to other people, that we don't even know if there are practical solutions to the problems you're listing. Every tool in this space suffers from the choices PGP implementations have made and asking what your uncle would do if trust conflicts occured when he's going to first be asked if he wants an RSA/RSA, RSA/DSA, DSA sign-only, or RSA sign-only key before he gets there, and then have to figure out what keyserver to send to and then.... Answering these high level UX questions requires having actual users.

XorNot 12y ago
Frankly, red/yellow/green is an excellent solution. Do I care now? No. Do I care when the secrecy is important? Maybe I'll not send things to non-green users.

tinco 12y ago

It's not a pitch for implementing WoT. It's a thought experiment to show that it could be viable. It won't make anyone happier if that's what you want, security never made any UI more pleasant. The system might send you an e-mail if someone casts doubt over the trustworthiness of a key. If you lose your phone with your keys, they're gone, just like when you lose your keys. I never said big scary warnings. Just small reminders that what's happening isn't secure, like the green bar in your browser. Most of the time harmless, but informative when you need it.